工具化宗教权力 / Instrumentalized Religious Power
工具化宗教权力 / instrumentalized religious power is the pattern Hanji 995 extracts from 笮融. Ze Rong uses the grain office entrusted by 陶谦 to build Buddhist temples at 下邳, order sutra recitation, grant exemptions to Buddhist households, and hold mass bathing-Buddha feasts tied to 释迦牟尼佛.
The concept does not claim that religion itself is false or violent. It names the danger that appears when religious symbols, charity, ritual, and belonging become an organizational shell for coercion, plunder, or private following. Ze Rong’s later murders of 赵昱, 薛礼, and 朱皓 turn his pious surface into a diagnostic contrast: the visible doctrine does not constrain his actual action.
Hanji 995 uses 张角’s 太平道 and 张鲁’s 五斗米道 as late-Han comparators for religious mobilization. They are not treated as equivalent to Ze Rong; their role is to show that religion can become an organizing medium in a collapsing order, while Ze Rong shows a more predatory form of that medium.
Key Claims
- Religious ritual can become political infrastructure when it organizes people, food, exemption, and loyalty.
- A moral or compassionate vocabulary is not reliable evidence of moral constraint.
- Critiquing instrumentalized religion is different from rejecting all religious meaning.
- Comparator cases should be bounded: 太平道 and 五斗米道 contextualize late-Han mobilization without making every movement Ze Rong-like.
- The pattern connects to Instrumental Belief Critique when doctrine becomes usable cover rather than binding commitment.